Wildfish

Robot friendly script to install PostGIS for use with Django's Geo framework.

Django's GIS framework is superb, and really fairly simple to use, but
it can be a bit of a pain to get PostGIS and associated bits installed.

The instructions here were a great help, but I needed to update a few
things to get them working for Postgres9.1. I've put everything into a
bash script which will do everything for you, here, and there's a few
other notes below.

PostGIS compilation errors

Attempting to compile and install PostGIS gave me an error:

cannot create directory \`/usr/share/postgresql/9.1/contrib': No such
file or directory

I had the postgresql-contrib-9.1 package installed, and couldn't see why
we didn't have perms to create this directory, so I created it:

sudo mkdir -p '/usr/share/postgresql/9.1/contrib/postgis-1.5'

Then ran it again, and it all installed fine. It appears that the
contrib location has moved. I get the impression there's probably a
better way to fix this.

Django 1.3 and standard_conforming_string

This is due an incompatibility between a change in Postgres 9.1's new
default config and Django 1.3. It requires the postgres setting for
standard_conforming_string to be off, but it's switched on by default
now. You can either set your standard_conforming_string = off in
postgres.conf, or you can patch Django. See here,
https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/16778.

Most will have heard of the GDPR by now, if only from the many privacy policy emails which flooded inboxes in the lead-up to the law taking effect on 25th May 2018. For those who have managed to escape the details, GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation, an EU...

The ethereum blockchain has a powerful ability to programmatically transfer assets
using smart contracts. In this post we will take a look at creating our own escrow
contract and running it to transfer funds between accounts via a third party.

To develop a smart contract on the ethereum blockchain we need a local environment to work in.
Obviously we don't want to test on the main network where we take on actual financial costs and
risks so instead we need to setup a test network. We could use one of the public test networks but
this takes a lot of time and memory to sync with. Instead it will often be sufficient to create a
personal, private test network with multiple accounts to interact with. This post shows how such a
network can be created locally using geth.